Freezing Root Veg Crock-Pot Mixtures

A while back, I picked up a ton of root vegetables and chopped them up.  I mixed them together and froze them in crock-pot sized increments.  Pretty straight forward set up.  Then I just add seasoning when I cook it.  I’ve done cranberry juice, rice vinegar, cream of mushroom soup, along with various herbs and seasonings.  Cranberry juice is amazing with sweet potatoes.  We’ve also added a ghost pepper once.  It make everything surprisingly spicy even though we didn’t eat the actual pepper.

Just put the veggies in the crock-pot, pour in your liquid of choice, add seasonings and then add water until everything is covered.  Put it on low for 8 or so hours.  You can also add in a bag of dried beans, just don’t use kidney beans, they require more prep.  This is a really laid back ‘recipe’, you just kind of throw stuff together.

Let me know what types of things you add for flavoring.

Making Pepper Spray or Cooking Ghost Peppers

I took a bunch of our ripe ghost peppers and decided to pickle them.  I combined them with a variety of other peppers we had lying around.  Habenero, chili, bell, and banana.

I carefully chopped the ghost peppers while wearing latex gloves but even that couldn’t protect me.  I could feel my eyes starting to water as I chopped them but them the recipe had me cook them in brine and that was when it got really bad.  I was sneezing and coughing.  I could actually taste the spiciness from just the steam from cooking them.  It was good that the minion was in another room while I was doing this. When I was done, I still had some hot pepper oils on my hand even though I had been wearing gloves the whole time.  Intense.  At least I got some pretty jars from it!

Moral of the story: be really careful with ghost peppers.

Eeek a Ghost! Pepper…

The hero has been wanting to grow ghost pepper, also known as naga bhut jolokia peppers, for a long time.  We both love spicy food and ghost peppers are supposed to be the spiciest peppers in the world according to the scoville scale which measures spiciness.  We looked for them online and only found kind of sketchy websites that sold them.  We had made a contact with a local farmer for next year, but we wanted some asap.

So today we went to Randy’s Nursery in Lawrenceville.  They specialize in exotic plants and water gardens.  We had mainly just wanted to look around and see what we could see, but we also decided to ask about ghost pepper plants.  They not only had them, they had a whole shelf of them.  They also had a great selection of other hot peppers.  We now have a go to place for hot pepper plants.

Anyways, we bought a ghost pepper plant and planted it in the yard.  We’ll see how it grows.